Week 31 – Testing & Field Trips

STANDARDIZED TESTING

Last week we had standardized testing on Mon-Wed for middle schoolers. Testing is a lot different in private schools being that we don’t receive government funds and therefore are not required to take state tests. Our school still has decided to take the IOWA (not named after the state) test as a way of helping us as educators see if there’s any disconcerting trends (such as a large portion of the 7th graders doing poorly on math estimation or something) as well as a measure to show ‘the outside world’ that there indeed is learning going on here. We don’t do any test prep, just tell them to do their best and leave anything blank if they don’t know. High schoolers take the SAT’s and ACT’s so we don’t have them take any other standardized tests.

Students had testing in the mornings from 8:30 – Noon for those three days. I proctored 8th graders. It was less grueling than proctoring the STAAR test a few years ago where you have to ‘actively monitor‘ for the four hour test, which means walking around the whole time; no email, no computer, no phone, etc. This time around, I was able to work on lesson plans, grade, etc. It was nice.

We give the students a pretty relaxed afternoon on testing days; movies and going to the park. Some of the students said they wished we just got all the testing over in two days instead of three. I don’t think that’s a terrible idea. The days seem to go really long when we were so off routine.

FIELD TRIPS

We figured we could throw all of our off-schedule stuff into one week. We went on the middle school field trips on Thursday and Friday. The first one was to a place where you got to do a ton of movie stunts and the second one was this roller skating / bowling / arcade complex. I had a ton of fun vlogging them. After about six hours of editing, here are the two videos I made. Hope you enjoy them.